Barbadians have been told they need to learn to “do a lot with a little bit” in the current economic climate.
That warning came from President of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) Verla De Peiza at a virtual meeting held at the party’s George Street headquarters on Monday night.
“The Democratic Labour Party since 2018 had to learn to do a lot with a little bit. And in 2022, Barbados is at a point where it has to learn that same lesson. Because today, only today, I had sight of the Article IV consultation with the IMF and what I saw would make me grow my hair if I wasn’t determined to keep it short.
“We are being told that we are on track heading to the six per cent surplus, and what I saw read minus 1.2 per cent. That means we have to make it up back to zero and then head back to six and we have three short years to get there, according to the timetable that was given,” she said.
De Peiza also spoke of what she called “creeping incursions into our democracy” which she said began in 2018 after the Barbados Labour Party swept the polls with a 30-0 victory.
“In 2018, after realising that they had all the seats, we heard the first set of loose talk, ‘we’re going to amend the constitution to allow the Democratic Labour Party to have seats in the Senate’…. Now, I can’t speak to what happened in June or July, but by August when I became the president I can assure you first of all that no such amendment went before Parliament for the benefit of the Democratic Labour Party, and no such proposal was put to me,” De Peiza said.
“And I want to make that clear because having won a seat under the Barbados Labour Party, Reverend Atherley had stepped over to the other side and declared himself the Leader of the Opposition. How he could be Leader of the Opposition and the Democratic Labour Party is getting Senate seats? That is not how the constitution is structured,” she said.
Another concern De Peiza raised was the process in which Barbados transitioned to a republic last November.
“We were told that this was a cosmetic change; we were simply moving from Governor General to President and there was nothing to worry about. And just in case you wanted to worry, they waited eight months before they next talked about it, and on the Day of National Significance, in a most insignificant manner, to make what ought to have been a momentous announcement, then to find out that what we were told and what we were getting were two completely different things,” she said.
The DLP leader argued that the transition was not just about moving from one figurehead to another.
“We were used to having a Governor General who stayed in place until they chose to leave or until God called them home and now we find ourselves with a President with a four-year term, which is scarily close to our political term of five years. An office that is not supposed to be political can’t be anything else in that term,” she said.
De Peiza also criticised the process that led to the naming of international superstar Rihanna the island’s 11th National Hero.
“Now, we spent months in consultation to come up with the first batch, but literally in the blink of an eye – because I don’t know who sat on any committee to determine anything at all…. No disrespect to the awardee but the process stank,” De Peiza said. (BT)
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